If anyone’s been at the space in the past couple of weeks, you may have noticed me peeling labels off tiny sanitizer bottles and measuring the insides of their caps with calipers while tweaking settings in OpenSCAD. This is for a project I’ll be bringing to the Internet Yami-Ichi this Saturday, September 12th at Knockdown Center. Aside from including generic aloe-vera hand sanitizer, “hidden” within the each cap is an 8GB USB drive pre-loaded with the Tails Live OS, 1.5.1 (sticker was sent to the printer before the new release), which you can boot into from most computers that allow booting from USB drives.

Tails is maintained by a team of really awesome folks across the world who are working in the Laura-Poitras-level edge cases of severe state surveillance that no one else will invest time or money into. In making a physical manifestation with a deliberate design, I want to commemorate what they do and bring their work to the attention of new audiences, in a similar vein as one of my projects last year. Tails also depends in part from donations from its users, so I’ll be pledging 25% of each sale at the Internet Yami-Ichi directly to the Tails project.

Managing private communication on the internet is a bit like space travel: It’s not impossible but the technology involved is difficult to use. Bring your laptop and your crypto-curiosity to Resistor on March 11th, 7:00pm for hands-on help with end-to-end secure email, anonymous web browsing, and general good practices for online privacy with folks that have been using this stuff for slightly longer than most. If you’re already an uber l337 cypherpunk and have a PGP key already, stick around for a key signing and probably some snacks!